Re: [office] Namespace 'of' for formula expressions

["Warren Turkal" <turkal@google.com>]

I am going to use the terminology from the XML namespace standard[1]
in this post.

I see no harm in allowing different qualified names for a given
namespace name. It's XML after all. If your tool so simple that it
doesn't understand XML namespaces, then your tool shouldn't be marked
compliant with an XML-based standard. Also, people who understand XML
would be required to think about qualified names in ODF documents
differently than other XML documents if we require the qualified name
to be some fixed string.

I think that the ODF standard should indicate which qualified names
correspond to which namespace names for the purposes of interpreting
the standard. However, the ODF standard should not require that
certain qualified names be used in all ODF documents.

[1]http://www.w3.org/TR/xml-names11/

wt

On Mon, Apr 14, 2008 at 6:49 AM,  <robert_weir@us.ibm.com> wrote:
>
> If the alias is "of" 99% of the time, it still breaks simple tools.  We
> really either need to mandate a prefix ("shall") or state that it is is
> implementation-dependent behavior, as any other namespace alias would be.
>
> Of course, if someone tries to mix ODF with some other ML that makes the
> same claim about the absoluteness of the "of" alias, but uses it as an alias
> for another namespace, then the whole world breaks.
>
> What are we talking about, in the end, for application complexity to handle
> an arbitrary alias?  A hashtable of aliases to namespace URI's?  I think one
> can still have a very simple script and still allow a hashtable of that
> sort.
>
> -Rob
>
>
> "David A. Wheeler" <dwheeler@dwheeler.com> wrote on 04/11/2008 05:16:26 PM:
>
>
>  > Eike Rathke:
>  > > Pardon? Sorry, I'm not sure I got that question correctly. If you're
>  > > referring whether aliasing the alias to arbitrary different names
> should
>  > > be allowed: I don't think so. IMHO it should be a fixed value for
>  > > simplicity, so yes, "of" would be the required namespace alias.
>  >
>  > Strictly speaking, from an XML point of view the "of" namespace
>  > alias could be any name; "aklfjsajfslkf:" would be fine as long as
>  > the matching namespace definition gave the same OpenFormula namespace.
>  >
>  > BUT: I think we _should_ limit or strongly encourage, the namespace
>  > alias to be "of" exactly, at least when it's inside an OpenDocument
>  > document.  The reason is that there are a lot of simple tools/
>  > libraries that don't handle namespaces exactly "correctly".  If we
>  > always use "of:", then the simple tools will work.... just grab the
>  > strings, and yank off the "of:" in front.  We want people to be able
>  > to develop simple tools to extract data from a document, and making
>  > that prefixed fixed simplifies their lives.
>  >
>  > There is the problem of nesting; I suppose we could change it to
>  > "should", if someone believes that's important.
>